Prada / Spring 2012 RTW

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“I was terrified,” said Miuccia Prada. “I wanted to take on the taboo of sweetness, which is one of the greatest qualities in women. But if you are not aggressive, too? How can that work, for a woman?” Miuccia Prada isn’t really happy—or fully herself as a designer—unless she’s exploring contradictions and burning through to new positions as a feminist. Her hot clash of intellectual impulses roared up the runway as a collection about cars and women, which, of course, is stereotypical, sexist shorthand for the way dumb men brag about the two things as if they’re trophies. A joke, of course, because when Miuccia is this revved up, it’s always about putting women in the driver’s seat.

The set was a garage—foam cars, fake oil slicks, and paint stains on the floor—not that one needed to get over-involved with scenery to understand that this Prada collection was both one of the most satisfyingly rounded and urgently desirable for years. Why? It’s in that edgy, teetering balance between an undercurrent of slutty sexuality and the ladylike hauteur that is the pure essence of Prada. The girls, walking out with greased hair pulled back with bobby pins, wore a wardrobe that, as Miuccia Prada intended, took on sugary pastels, Swiss lace, and tons of feminine pleating and car-print silks merged with hot-rod iconography in leather appliquéd skirts and shoes with 3-D spurs flaming from the heels.

On another level, this collection was also a return to the controlled, knee-length silhouettes and bourgeois taste-level first set out in the nineties. “I want to do what I really like,” said Miuccia as she stood backstage after the show, receiving sustained applause from the models and audience alike. The thrill was the feeling that there was something so authentically personal in this show. The renditions of antique jewelry (crystal drop earrings dangling from flowered studs, faux-antique necklaces, and jeweled belts) looked like versions of the pieces the designer wears herself. Yet it was far from a complacent round-up of her greatest hits. Instead, her uses of color—combinations of burgundy with cornflower blue, coral and yellow, bottle-green and pink—were feats she never wanted to pull off in the monochrome nineties. And what clinches it? The overriding fact that, for all her engagement in concept, color, print, and decoration, this is also a collection which is calculated to be accessible. “There are basically no dresses,” she pointed out. “They are all pieces, combined in a realistic way.”